​This season is back to school time for many duelists, so in this article we will be jumping into my favorite office supplies-based archetype: Deskbots!

Deskbots haven’t seen much of the competitive spotlight, so why build a deck around them? For starters, the Deskbot Pendulum monsters have powerful effects that synergize with Heavymetalfoes Electrumite – Deskbot 005 Special Summons a Deskbot from the graveyard when it’s destroyed, and Deskbot 006 adds one from the graveyard to the hand. This means that the Deskbot cards have strong synergy with all the Pendulum cards that are already good at making Electrumite. However, the deck also picks up some advantages over a standard Pendulum deck by using the Deskbots. Deskbot 003 has a powerful Normal Summon effect that isn’t once per turn, so we can take advantage of cards that give us an addition Normal Summon, like the Symphonic Warriors. In both cases, we are designing a stronger deck by giving it access to strong cards from other engines.

In the Summon Saur-ceress article, we built the deck backwards – we started with the combo we wanted our deck to do and chose cards that would let us do it most consistently. We’ll be going through this deck in the opposite way and start by building the engine that will give us the most options. From there, we’ll figure out the most powerful things that engine can do.

The power players of the Deskbot lineup are 003 and 005. Their effects to Special Summon a Deskbot when they are Normal Summoned and destroyed, respectively, give the deck an easy way to find monsters to Pendulum Summon. Deskbot 002 is usually the best one to summon with these effects, since it searches another Deskbot card when it’s Special Summoned to keep the combo going. This effect isn’t once per turn either, so the engine can find lots of copies of the cards it needs with only a single starter. Deskbot 006 isn’t nearly as good as 005, but it’s included to have a searchable 1 scale. Deskbot 004 Special Summons 2 Deskbots when it kills something in battle, which makes it very good going second. The other Deskbot cards’ effects aren’t good enough to make the cut, so these 11 are all we’ll be using. One card you might notice is missing from this list is Machine Duplication – although this is very powerful with Deskbot 002 or 003, it’s not strong enough when drawn by itself to include in this type of deck. Besides, most hands with Deskbot 002 or 003 in this deck are usually good enough to win without the help of Machine Duplication!

The Pendulum Monsters3 Mythical Beast Master Cerberus2 Mythical Beast Jackal Knight3 Chronograph Sorcerer1 Timegazer Magician3 Symphonic Warrior Guitaar3 Symphonic Warrior Miccs2 Abyss Actor Curtain Raiser​The next set of cards are all common inclusions in any pendulum deck, perhaps apart from the Symphonic Warriors. Curtain Raiser, Chronograph, and Master Cerberus are all great draws that get us started by efficiently summoning Electrumite. The Symphonic Warriors serve the same purpose of putting a Pendulum monster on the board, but also combo directly with our Deskbot cards by giving easy access to an extra Normal Summon. The scales in this package aren’t great for most Pendulum decks (all our 1 scales have some kind of restriction, and our next lowest scale is a 4) but they will work fine for our purposes. When we make Electrumite, it will almost always be before Pendulum Summoning, so we can use its effect to fix our scales to fit the particular play we’re doing. We will often fix our scales by searching Miccs to pair with Guitaar, so including the 3rd Miccs means we can usually do this without wasting an Electrumite effect. If we can’t do this it is usually not a problem, since the most important monsters we’ll be Pendulum Summoning are level 5 and up.

If you thought this deck couldn’t get any weirder, we’re now adding Ancient Gear cards to it. Ancient Gear Box searches a Deskbot card when it’s added to your hand, which is conveniently done by Ancient Gear Wyvern when it’s summoned. However, don’t really want to draw either of these two, since we’d rather use Ancient Gear Catapult to fetch Wyvern from the deck. This play starts off our combo with an additional monster on our field and in our hand, as well as searching a Deskbot monster (usually 003) that we can Normal Summon right away. Although these cards can be bad in multiples and can conflict with some of our Pendulum cards, it’s important that we maximize consistency by including the greatest number of cards that access our core engine.

The Rest1 Glow-Up Bulb1 Soul Charge1 Upstart Goblin1 Foolish Burial1 Monster Reborn​If you’ve been counting, you’ll notice that we’re at 35 cards which leaves us 5 spots to build some actual defense into our deck. This is more than enough, because the type of defense we want is going to be searchable anyway and will mostly come from our Extra Deck. At this point, we have a good number of level 4 Earth monsters (both Ancient Gears and Deskbot 004), which means we can probably look at Naturia Beast as a defensive tool. Since Deskbot 001 is a Tuner, it might make sense to access Beast with that, but it can’t be Pendulum Summoned and its effect is hard for us to use. Instead, we’ll use the classic Glow-Up Bulb, since it is almost as easy to dig for and can summon itself much more easily. This deck has a bunch of level 6 monsters, so we could send Bulb with Beatrice, the Eternal Lady, but our level 6 monsters are all Pendulums and we would rather use those to make Electrumite. We can use Meliae of the Trees, which takes 2 level 3 Earth monsters, for the same effect – we should be able to make it with the 2 copies of Deskbot 003 we plan to Normal Summon. Even though consistently summoning Naturia Beast will be enough sometimes, we would also like another layer of defense to protect it. Since Deskbot 005 and Miccs are both level 5 machines, we can easily make Cyber Dragon Infinity with cards already in our deck. We can fill in the rest of our Main Deck with some generic good stuff to round it out to 40.

The Extra Deck contains everything we’ll use in our combos, including the monsters we plan to end on (Beast and Infinity) and the monsters we’ll use to get there (Meliae and Electrumite). Qliphort Genius and Saryuja Skull Dread are not integral combo pieces, but they offer additional ways to do things our deck already can do. This means we will still be able to do most of our combos, even if we don’t draw a great hand. The rest of the Extra Deck is left open to strong Link monsters, mostly things we’ll want going second.

Although this is still a combo deck, there isn’t one single combo that we are trying to do every game. One hard part about learning to play this deck is figuring out how the different cards can get you to whatever end field you’re trying to make, usually Naturia Beast and Infinity. Here’s one example of a combo done with Guitaar, Deskbot 003, and Master Cerberus, plus a card to discard for Guitaar (this video was recorded before Knighmtare Goblin was banned, but you can just as easily use Proxy Dragon for this). Notice how this combo uses 2 Deskbot 002’s instead of a Deskbot 004 or Ancient Gear monster to make Naturia Beast – intricacies like this make the deck flexible and powerful, since you can do a combo many ways. It takes a while to play a deck like this perfectly, but that’s part of the fun!

​That’s it for today’s article! If you have a deck idea you would like to see in an article, message the ARG PRO Yugioh Team Facebook page and we will try to make it happen! Thanks for reading and as always, Play Hard or Go Home!

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By VINNIE SILVERMAN​

Vinnie Silverman has been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! at a competitive level for 8 years and is always on the forefront of new deck building strategies. When he's not playing at locals with his latest brew, he studies Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and learns other TCGs.

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